With the miniaturization and increased mobility of computing devices, various infrastructure improvements have been implemented to allow the full use of such devices. One important improvement has been the wide spread and growing availability of short-range wireless network access, e.g., WiFi (a standardized wireless network type created by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, now renamed the Wi-Fi Alliance). The WiFi protocol allows mobile devices to connect to the internet via a WiFi access point (AP), and such APs are now available in offices, schools, restaurants, sporting venues, and many other sites.
Because WiFi APs are open to a large number of users, it is important to conserve channels and bandwidth. One way of doing this has been limit the time that non-active sessions are kept open. What this means is that an idle session will be closed by the AP for lack of activity after some amount of idle time. Unfortunately, the session may still be in use by an application on the mobile device, such that tearing down the connection disrupts the application's operation.
It is possible in the inventor's view for a device to periodically send token traffic over an otherwise idle connection to prevent a tear down of the connection by the AP. However, this tactic wastes AP bandwidth and also wastes device battery power. Moreover, since the time-out interval is unknown, the device may be sending more traffic than is needed to keep the connection active at one AP, while sending too little traffic to keep the connection active at another AP.
Although the disclosed embodiments use WiFi as an example environment, it will be appreciated that the disclosed principles similarly apply to any network access technology having similar salient characteristics, e.g., (1) a connection between points has a time out feature such that if the connection is not used for a certain time it is closed, (2) end-points are not informed beforehand about the impending disconnection, and (3) sending any data via over the connection resets the timeout.
Before moving to other portions of this description, it is noted that the present disclosure is directed to a system that may exhibit improvements over prior systems. However, it should be appreciated that any such improvements are not limitations on the scope of the disclosed principles nor of the attached claims, except to the extent expressly noted to be critical. Additionally, the discussion of any problem in this Background section is not an indication that the problem represents known prior art.